Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Action on Energy

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

May 29, 1975, Page 34 The New York Times Archives

President Ford's stop‐gap effort to get some kind of oil conservation program under way—through doubling the import fee, initiating gradual price decontrol for “old” wells and a proposal for a windfall profits tax—is far from an adequate substitute for Congressional action, as the President emphasized. What the country and the world need is a comprehensive energy plan that stimulates alternate sources of supply as well as more effective conservation. Only the Congress can authorize that.

The legislative program the Administration has proposed would reduce oil imports from the present level of 6.3 million barrels a day to 4.9 million in 1985—not self‐sufficiency, but an improvement that, with diversification of import sources and stockpiles for emergencies, might make the country relatively invulnerable to an Arab oil embargo. In contrast, the limited measures the President announced Tuesday night would see oil imports rise rather than decline; but without any action at all, oil imports are sure to rise very much higher.

Yet the Congress, with the Democratic majority badly divided, has been unable to take action, either on the thirteen measures the President proposed in January or on proposals of its own. On the conservation side, where the leadership of Chairman Ullman of the House Ways and Means Committee has carried legislative work furthest, a tax on gasoline alone would be substituted for the across‐the‐board import fees and price decontrol; but there is every indication that the House, with eyes on the voters more than the country's interests, will delete the gasoline tax—the only really important part of the bill—if it ever reaches the floor.

By Congressional default, the President's stop‐gap measures may remain on the books. But that still will not relieve the Congress of the responsibility for voting an effective oil conservation program.